Practical Mapmaking

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by Steve Plambeck

For those using many different scales, how do you decide on turn length and movement allowance on those different maps? (I haven't looked too closely at that part of the new ITL but I suppose it gave some guidelines?)

We started with that ITL says, and eventually developed more detailed things for other situations that eventually came up.

ITL talks about details of using three scales:

* The familiar combat scale

* "Labyrinth" scale where each hex is a combat megahex (and the activities described in terms of time and distance are not combat, but walking, running, searching, mapping, hearing sound at a distance through obstacles, etc.

* Travel scale, where there is a basic system somewhat scattered through ITL where turns are essentially days, and ground speeds per day are based on the terrain type and whether the party is lost or not (which can also make them go the wrong direction), and the threats are exposure, starvation, getting lost, and encounters (with a suggested very basic daily encounter system which GM's can elaborate on when they outgrow it). The Legacy Dran travel map is 5 miles per hex; the original Dran map was 12.5km per hex, and the suggested road travel rates have been increased.

There is also the Bendwyn village map which is now labeled at 10 yards per hex (the same map in original ITL was labeled 20 meters...) or a megahex of combat megahexes per hex. These we found useful for having the sense of what's where in a village, and occasionally doing chases, sneaking about, long-range shots, and figuring out what the combat map should be like when combats happened there.

If you get to a situation in play where you care about how much game time and/or combat turns are occurring while people are moving on a local map like the Bendwyn map, you will want to apply longer turns than five seconds to that movement if you're tracking positions with hexes rather than pencil marks and rulers. Also you may care to take into account at that scale, at least for running down roads, that running people and animals in real life move a LOT faster than their TFT MA when running in a straight line after having got up to speed, so it makes sense if/when you care about that to let straight line running speed over good terrain be higher than MA per five seconds, or the Labyrinth scale running rates.